Toshiba Announces Hard Drive Capacity Breakthrough

Today Toshiba is to announce a data storage breakthrough that it was able to achieve significant higher capacities in hard drives at the Magnetic Recording Conference in San Diego. The company reported that it made significant breakthrough in its research of magnetic storage bit-pattern media which is said to be the technology of the future.

Currently available hard drives use magnetic material spread across its disk surface to save data. However this technology has reached its limits and more condensed storage is not possible. However, the new Bit-patterned technology allows for more storage of data within a single magnetic bit. A disk is made up of thousands of magnetic bits.

Toshiba claims that even though the technology is in development stage it would roughly increase the hard drive space by about 500 percent! Current technology has a density of 541 gigabits per square inch and with bit-patterned media that will be increased considerably to around 2.5 terabits per square inch.

Toshiba expects the first high capacity hard drives to be out by 2013.